Mendele: Yiddish literature and language
______________________________________________________
Contents of Vol. 3.217
February 7, 1994

1) The Khazars (Ron Rabin)
2) Genetic markers (Jascha Kessler)
3) Schindler's List (Ellen Prince)
4) European Jewry (Ellen Prince)

1)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun Feb  6 17:03:28 1994
From: RABINRL@SNYBUFVA.CS.SNYBUF.EDU
Subject:  The Khazars

Just to be clear on Koestler's _The Thirteenth Tribe_ and what its
assertions and difficulties are.  The question is not whether or not
the Khazars, as a matter of historical record, converted to Judaism.
It seems they did.  What is not clear, and Koestler doesn't discuss,
is whether the historical record states that the entire population
of Khazaria converted or if it was just the aristocracy.  The
conversion itself was for political advantage since it opted the
Khazars out of the conversion competition between the Eastern Church
to the west and Islam to the south.  But this advantage would obtain
as nicely, perhaps, were Judaism to be merely the state religion
with the folk ignoring it. Even if one accepts that everyone
converted, there is the additional question of how many people
everyone was.  Koestler's thesis is that when Khazaria fell,
overwhelmed by succeeding waves of migration from central Asia, its
Jewish residents were pushed out and there were simply too many of
them to have been absorbed without a trace.  This is the pattern of
the Huns, a Turkic people, who, under such migration pressure,
spilled over the mountains and remained an identifiable group, the
Hungarians.

So, if you grant that all of the Khazars converted, and you grant
that there were lots of them (how many is "lots" not to be absorbed
to invisibility?), where did the Khazars go?  They would've been
pushed west and north--north, too, since that was their normal
trading domain, up the Volga.

But, as Ellen Prince notes, where's the linguistic evidence? The
Khazars should've brought some variety of Turkish with them into
Ukraine, into Poland; and it should've made a difference in the
linguistic record and that evidence isn't there.

Ron Rabin

2)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun Feb  6 18:01:41 1994
From: KESSLER  <IME9JFK@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU>
Subject: genetic markers

to suggest to Rabin that he might consider other genetic markers,
other than surface characteristics, I will repeat that the idea of
sampling the blood type distribution was, and remains far more
suggestive that Tartar types, etc.  It doesnt need rape, or
subjection.  As I proposed, people have been wandering and t
ravelling for millennia, long before the the middleclass prudery,
clannish exogamy prohibitions, etc. We dont know at all what the
Jews before 100 AD were like.  We dont know what happened to the
gene pool of the Jews in China, who left behind such traces as
something to do with a candle on Friday? or what?  Chinese who are
utterly Chinese.  One cannot see the latent markers in the genes;
one sees only the ones manifest, and we know that 2 latent genes
brought together male and female can produce a catastrophe for the
parents, including Tay-Sachs and other defects.  What will happen to
that boatload ov Vietnamese, for example, who by the law of the sea
were picked up by an Israeli freighter.  Their children are now in
the Israel IDF, utterly Vietnamese citizens of Israel.  Give them
100= years...  Come on, let us not project the inbred shtetl
mentalities back on the ancestors.

Kessler

3)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon Feb  7 03:03:45 1994
From: "Ellen F. Prince" <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: schindler's list

Hershel Berman:

i had the same thoughts about 'jerusalem of gold' and why not, e.g.,
zog nit keynmol, the partisan hymn,.... re the characters speaking
hebrew, i guess i missed that. where does it happen? as for the rest
of the movie, i think a line in the english forward said it best:
'another feel-good holocaust movie about christian redemption and
jewish helplessness'. i personally found the depiction of jews in
the ghetto and camp outrageous and several scenes downright obscene
(jews not letting other jews into their hiding places--3 times i
believe, the 'jappy' woman who refuses to go into a sewer--the only
adults shown trying to escape, the auschwitz shower scene ending in
joy and merriment, among others). (one irish-american friend pointed
out that the near-final scene of schindler departing reminded him of
the 'darkies' coming out all misty-eyed at the end of 'gone with the
wind'.)

Ellen Prince

4)----------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon Feb  7 03:03:45 1994
From: "Ellen F. Prince" <ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: european jewry

dan slobin:

i really don't know how many rapes have to occur within a population
for the visible changes (hair color, complexion...) to take effect,
but i imagine (perhaps wrongly) that it would have to be extremely
frequent, widespread nightly occurrences as in the old south, in any
event far more frequent (thank goodness) than the pogroms were. this
is not at all to minimize the horror of rape or pogroms and i'm
sorry if that's how it sounded.

ron rabin:

thanks for the reference on the genetic studies--i look forward to
reading it. but i didn't mean to suggest that european jews were
genetically indistinguishable from their non-jewish neighbors;
obviously many are in terms of visible features, plus we know of
'jewish' diseases like diabetes and, even more marked, tay-sachs
disease. but the inescapable fact is that many many european jews
have distinctly non-semitic physical features, which is what
inspired the original question raised here, i believe, which begs an
answer. re slave/master language in the u.s., could you give me a
reference please? other than the trivial case of specialized lexical
items like 'goober' and 'gumbo', i don't know of any 'white' english
features that have been traced with confidence to west african
languages. all the research i know of looking at west african
influences on english have been looking at west african influences
on african-american english vernacular, quite a different matter. as
i said, i'd be very interested in a reference. thanks.

to dan and ron and everyone: as i said, i have no proof whatsoever
for my 'hunch', which is why i wouldn't write it anywheres but in a
nice 'heymish' place like mendele. what i'd like to know from you
and from social historians and sociologists is: are there any
accounts of early migrations of jews from german-speaking lands to
slavic-speaking lands that might shed light on the makeup in terms
of males/females of the migrating groups? if not, how might one go
about determining such things? thanks.

jascha kessler:

thanks for the ashley montague reference. it doesn't surprise me but
it's nice to know it for a fact.

ellen prince

______________________________________________________
End of Mendele Vol. 3.217

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